Re: Shrinking entry boxes?

["Timothy M. Shead" <tshead k-3d com>]

James K. Wiggs wrote:

>  Good day, Folks;
>
>    I'm busy building input GUIs for an application I'm working on,
> and I'm using a lot of GtkComboBox widgets for text and numerical
> inputs.  I've been building the base code using Glade and then
> modifying it to use some of my internal functions to create/edit
> the contents of the combolists.  My question is this: how do I
> force these boxes to shrink down to a reasonable size?  Even if I
> set the parameters in Glade for expand and fill to false, they
> end up being anywhere from 2 to 5 times as large as they need to
> be for the input values they contain.  A combo box with an input
> list whose longest value is perhaps 6-7 characters will end up
> large enough to hold over 20 characters.  Combo boxes that contain
> only integer values ranging up to 200 or so will *still* be about
> 20 characters wide, even though only 3-4 are needed.  Is there
> some way to manually force these things to only be N characters or
> perhaps N pixels wide?  Or does GTK+'s internal size allocations
> code preclude this, short of using a Layout widget?
James K. Wiggs wrote:

> Good day, Folks;
>
> I'm busy building input GUIs for an application I'm working on,
> and I'm using a lot of GtkComboBox widgets for text and numerical
> inputs.  I've been building the base code using Glade and then
> modifying it to use some of my internal functions to create/edit
> the contents of the combolists.  My question is this: how do I
> force these boxes to shrink down to a reasonable size?  Even if I
> set the parameters in Glade for expand and fill to false, they
> end up being anywhere from 2 to 5 times as large as they need to
> be for the input values they contain.  A combo box with an input
> list whose longest value is perhaps 6-7 characters will end up
> large enough to hold over 20 characters.  Combo boxes that contain
> only integer values ranging up to 200 or so will *still* be about
> 20 characters wide, even though only 3-4 are needed.  Is there
> some way to manually force these things to only be N characters or
> perhaps N pixels wide?  Or does GTK+'s internal size allocations
> code preclude this, short of using a Layout widget?

The C++ SDPGTK (http://www.k-3d.com) library easily does this for any 
widget, both through GTKML (XML) templates, and programmatically.  The 
following code allows you to set fractional character sizes, and is 
easily adaptable to "C":

void sdpGtkWidget::SetCharacterSize(gdouble Width, gdouble Height)
{
// Sanity checks ...
g_return_if_fail(Attached());

const static sdpString 
metrictext("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789_^");

GtkWidget* widget = GTK_WIDGET(m_Object);

gint lbearing = 0;
gint rbearing = 0;
gint width = 0;
gint ascent = 0;
gint descent = 0;

gdk_string_extents(widget->style->font, metrictext, &lbearing, 
&rbearing, &width, &ascent, &descent);

gdouble averagewidth = gdouble(lbearing + width + rbearing) / 
gdouble(metrictext.size());
gdouble averageheight = gdouble(ascent + descent);

gdouble targetwidth = Width * averagewidth;
gdouble targetheight = Height * averageheight;

gtk_widget_set_usize(widget, gint(targetwidth) + 
widget->style->klass->xthickness, gint(targetheight) + 
widget->style->klass->ythickness);
}

Regards,
Timothy M. Shead
tshead k-3d com